Black & White and Cardinal Red All Over

Mitch McConnell Has No Clue

I keep waiting for the republicans to step up to the plate. There is a lot of whining and hand wringing from the rightwingers but very little in terms of concrete proposals from the Gang With No Ideas. It seems like once you get past the mantra of tax cuts (which, as I have pointed out in this space before, is merely a ploy to starve social programs and eliminate entitlements without having the testicular fortitude to actually say so) the republicans have nothing. No new ideas. No proven concepts. Only tried and failed practices that the American public isn’t buying into anymore.

Instead of submitting a budget proposal of their own, republicans are content to try and nitpick the Democratic proposal which merely goes to further show that even when they do not have the power that republicans cannot govern, only criticize. Given the brain trust available to them you would figure that some think tank, some Senate staffers, some rightwing thinkers could cobble together a proposal to run the government. After all, they have been pushing budgets out since 1995 when they took over Congress. You would think they would have it down pat by now. I say that knowing full well that the last few attempts that republicans made to pass such a budget, much less put it together, ended in abject failure. 

This pretense at governing is truly pathetic. For all the ideas and concepts they claim to have, the proof that they really have nothing is borne out by the Senate Minority Leader’s inability to present an alternative to President Obama’s budget that they claim “taxes too much, it spends too much, it borrows too much.” They can pick at it and offer substandard alternatives to Democratic proposals but they are failures when it comes to establishing a beach head and advancing their cause in the face of overwhelming popular support for the president’s plans.

It appears that the republicans have little more to offer the budget process than a big fat NO to anything offered up by the Democrats. McConnell could not suggest one program or solution to our current situation that isn’t just a warmed-over complaint about a previously advanced proposal. There was no No Child Left Behind. There was no Medicare Drug Plan. There was no Social Security Recovery Program. Nothing. Just whining and bitching. Quite frankly, it’s all they have left. All the big ideas and new fixes are coming from the left side of the aisle. The republicans are out-of-the-loop, clueless, and in danger of becoming a larger, more incompetent form of the Libertarian party.

Oops, too late.

link: http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/15/mcconnell-budget/